Published 6:00 pm, Saturday, February 9, 2008

Assuming the biblical phrase "We reap what we sow" means positive outcomes as well as negative, Thomas Paine never got his just due  not even in death.

Arguably the premiere literary architect of our revolution, he suffered such slings and arrows of outraged fortune that had he been a religious man, he might have thought himself the reincarnation of Job.

History records that Paine was born 271 years ago last month in England to lower-class Quaker-Church of England parents. Being forced to read and study the Bible as a boy may have helped develop his antipathy for religion.

He worked in his father's business as a staymaker, opened his own shop in the Village of Sandwich and married Mary Lambert in September 1759. Less than a year later, she died in premature childbirth.

Six years after that, his staymaker business failed and he began work as an exciseman for the king  a job he kept for 10 years, when he was fired in a failed bid to gain a pay raise for himself and his colleagues.

During that 10-year period, he and his second wife divorced and he ran a tobacco shop until that business also failed. Years later, he was quoted as saying: "I do not understand trade."

His life took a bit of an upturn in 1772 and helped lead him to the New World when he met Benjamin Franklin in London, where Franklin frequented more than one woman of ill-repute.

Their relationship grew as they attended scientific lectures together and he began developing a natural philosophy that later evolved into Deism, which, loosely outlined, says: God yes. Religion no.

He sailed for America in 1774 and arrived in Philadelphia suffering from typhus.

While recovering, he wrote an essay a year and a half before the Declaration of Independence that called for colonial separation from England  marking the beginning of a series of writings that encouraged freedom, reason and common sense in running the affairs of mankind.

He took up arms during the Revolutionary War and gained a reputation as "a brave soldier."

But his main contribution to the cause came in "The Crisis," which totaled 15 individual essays that helped spur the dispirited Continental Army on to ultimate victory.

His reward was a 300-acre farm in New Rochelle, N.Y., that had been appropriated from a Tory.

He began a series of writings that included the "Age of Reason" and admonished the provisional government of France not to execute the king and queen in the wake of the French Revolution.

He said to abolish the positions but spare them. That effort landed him in the prison of Luxembourg for nearly a year, during which time he suffered from a fever and inhumane treatment that almost ended his life.

He was eventually released and nursed back to health by James Monroe and his wife, Elizabeth.

It was then that Paine wrote the second installment of "Age of Reason" and used the Bible against itself to urge an end to superstition. The work was banned in England as blasphemy and led to threats and ostracism against him in this country.

"On the eighth of June, 1809, about nine in the morning," wrote his friend, Clio Rickman, "he placidly, and almost without a struggle, died as he had lived  a Deist."

Because his views on religion were so out of step with the times, he died virtually alone  with only seven people in attendance at his funeral. He was refused burial in a Quaker cemetery and his remains were interred on his farm in New York.

The man who was the first to call for an end to slavery, among the first to fight for equal rights for women and the first to propose the constitutional form of government we take for granted today isn't even buried in the country he helped found  a country that's been a beacon of hope and inspiration for humanity throughout the world for more than two centuries now.

His remains were dug up 10 years after his death and returned to England, where they were ultimately lost.

(Richard Orr is a Herald correspondent. Contact him at royko@sptc.net)